Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

He shouts at me as if I were a servant who had renounced his allegiance. What a disgrace! It would have been better for him to come to my aid and save me during the ordeal with the hotel, instead of following the news from afar and dumping his miserable advice on me. No one will decide for me. Let him wait until I’m dead and gone and then he can do whatever he wants. As long as I’m alive, no one decides behind my back.

I said I would not sell the hotel, and I meant it. I sold everything to pay the debts. Now I have nothing but ruins. But I am happy with that, happy to rival the ruins of Walili. I am happy to stop by the Cantina on my way back from the site and listen to the babbling of drunk customers, the way it happened a long time ago. With my exhausted vision I see Diotima sitting on the throne in the lobby, protected by my eternal mosaic, in my house, the house of the handsome young man.

This is the only war that resembles the Rif’s war of liberation, because it is fraught with pride, malice, stubbornness and resistance. The ‘genius’, that government official, says that patriotism nowadays is having a development project! God Almighty, what’s the connection between this philosophy and your insistence on sequestering the hotel and offering it as a gift to your wife and your brother-in-law? Do you mean to say that the bankrupt are the traitors of the age? Fine. Why don’t you erect a gallows to speed up growth then?

Youssef and his lawyer friend insist that I end the story in an elegant way. What does elegance have to do with it? Are we doing business with Yves Saint Laurent? If the issue is basically dirty, why do we insist on making it look good with ridiculous reasoning?

I had planned to put the hotel in my wife’s name, which would only have been fair. This is where we wove the fabric of our relationship, in one of its rooms we found our path, and through its complex lawsuits over debt, water and the bar we built our life. But I had an intuition that it would fall into their hands, and a mysterious presentiment made me change my mind at the last minute. She was neither angry nor sad, as if she expected it and secretly wished for it. She told me in a moment of harmony that the genius’s wife visited her and engaged her in a discussion about the brilliant future of the hotel, casting allusions that would have made an ascetic’s mouth water. Well, well, the story is suspicious. Otherwise, why this insistence from my son, my own blood!

He shouts in my face without shame, but forgets that I am right. Having children is not a secondary issue, otherwise God would have ended it with Adam and Eve. Life gives birth to life and death gives birth to death, in perpetuity. I can imagine his anger when he learns that it was my idea. Yes, I was the one who told Bahia, ‘Why don’t you try for another child? If you want to stay alive despite Yacine’s death, you must listen to the laws of nature. Otherwise death will swallow you, because death gives birth to death and life begets eternal life!’

He wanted to die in a state of sadness, that’s his problem. Why does he shout in my face? OK, let’s drop the subject. He’ll soon return to his senses and understand that lineage is not an insignificant matter. Just think about the number of wars we averted, the plagues, the famines and the accidents we were spared, from the Rif to Bu Mandara, from Bu Mandara to Germany, and from Germany to Zarhoun. We faced the year of the war, the year of famine, the year of typhus, the year of perdition and the year of pox. There was also the war with Spain, the war with France, the war with thieves and bandits, the war with Oufkir, with Dulaymi and with Al-Basri. We even fought wars against windmills, against the years of immigration, the ‘Years of Lead’ and the years of Al-Bu Kalib. We crossed all those deserts without ever giving up the perpetuation of the descendants. This weak being was born half dead and endured smallpox at the age of five. He fell in a well when he was hardly six, and aged seven Bu Habbah’s gun exploded in his hands. He memorised the Qur’an at nine and his mother, may her soul rest in peace, slaughtered a rooster at the tomb of Sidi Abdallah on the last Friday of every month. She did not do it for him to succeed and to win the endless battles and wars he fought, but for his mere survival. After all that, we want to wipe out this nation! What for? Because Sidi Moulay Youssef can’t stand the sight of a pregnant woman? By God, if the situation were only a matter of exceptional energy and strength, I would have married a beautiful and fertile woman and would have given birth to a new generation. I would have filled this lazy country with descendants from the geniuses of the Rif!

Oh, I feel so sorry for Youssef! It would have been more honourable for him to back me verbally, to say out loud that no one had the right to take the hotel by force from its owner. It was my right to decide against reopening the bar. God’s land is wide and vast. Whoever has a development project in mind, let him move far from these mountains where the wind whistles. Whoever wants to lodge foreigners in charming rooms overlooking the souls of the Romans, let him build a place for them over the Cave of the Pigeons. Why this insistence? I am certain that it is not a matter of profit and loss, but what counts is that it came from his mouth. The genius said he wanted the hotel and therefore the universe had to comply, even if it meant bombing Zarhoun with napalm.

What do you want from this city sleeping so peacefully near its mausoleum? Look in the mines of the cities where, most certainly, your companions play with gold. Do you think they would have handed you these rusty keys, had they seen the glint of the dinars behind their doors? You can dig tooth and nail from the Spring of the Skull to the Valley of the Dead, but you won’t find anything to put between your teeth! Pay attention to names, my son. A city that is located between a skull and the dead, what do you expect from it?

I have memorised all the battles of this country. If I were to put them in a mosaic, it would be the most wonderful mosaic in the world, and the largest and the most stupid! There is the battle of Bu Hmara against the country of Awlad Youssef, the battle of the commander Qatirah against the country of Bab al-Rumaila, the battle of chief Al-Ghali against the country of Al-Mars, the battle of the Khalifa al-Haymar against the country of Al-Hamri, the battle of Bsilty against the country of Bu Riah. What has become of all this territory that everyone fights over? Lives were lost, acts of vengeance have been postponed, and there are courts, judges and bribes, battles to enforce the law and physical coercion. Yet poverty remains king here, reigning over the throne of that Zawiya. It is said that it was a curse from Moulay Idriss against the inhabitants, who gave him away to his enemies, the Abbasids, who poisoned him. It is also said that it is the blessing of Moulay Idriss. It guaranteed people subsistence and their abstinence and did not allow the accumulation of wealth.

This was your old man Al-Firsiwi’s mistake. He thought in a moment of wild elation that he could overstep the authority of the holy Wali and build an empire drowning in wealth. The truth is that nothing grows in this luxuriant shade, where height and wingspan are made to measure. It was obvious that somewhere there was a terrible mistake, you in your Mercedes with the German woman next to you in full regalia, numbers spinning in your head and deals you could sniff out from afar. It was obvious that somewhere there was a terrible mistake. The land, the olive trees, the carob trees and the Cantina!

Before all that, there was this damned arrogance that, more than anything, pushed you to humiliate decent people. It is true that some of them were no more than miserable, effaced individuals, their teeth and their looks destroyed by smoking keef , their skin yellowed like those who spend most of their time inside tombs. Why did you put them on display, to mark an occasion or otherwise, before the masses, to cheer you and honour you, rolling up their trousers to work for you, and begging, yes, stretching their arms to beg? You thought it was a wonderful spectacle, a splendid scene that you eternalised in the mosaic of the swimming pool. It represents a row of stunned individuals with their emaciated arms stretched towards Bacchus, who showers them with gold pieces of different shapes!